"I could of set there talking with him all evening, but not on the night of Sodality's Annual. I'd stopped by for Mis' Emmons. She was getting ready, and while I waited I could hear folks passing on their way to the schoolhouse where the meeting was. For the town was all het up about what the meeting was going to do.
"I'd seen half-dozen or so of us that afternoon when we was putting plants on the hall platform, and we'd all spoke our minds.
"'I'm gaspin',' observed Mis' Sturgis, 'to take a straw vote of us on this amendin' business. Near as I can make out, it's going through.'
"'Near as I can make out,' says Marne Holcomb, 'a good deal more than amending is going on here to-night. It looks to me as if Sodality was just going to get into its own Cemetery and be forgot, and as if something else was coming to meet us—something big!'
"Mis' Toplady spoke up, comfortable, down on her knees putting green paper on the pots.
"'Well, my land!' she says, 'I've noticed two-three things in my lifetime. And one is, that do what whoever will, things do change. And so whenever a new change pops up, I always think: "Oh, I guess you're comin' along anyway. I donno's I need to help." An' yet somethin' in me always prances to pitch in, too.'
"Timothy was there, occupying himself with the high places us ladies couldn't get up to.
"'Well,' says he, 'if folks stop dying, like Sodality evidently intends they shall if it goes out of business, maybe you'll stay home some, Amandy, and not always be off laying folks out.'
"'I know it,' Mis' Toplady returns, 'I've laid out most everybody I know, and of course I'm real glad to do it. But the last dead's hair I done up, I caught myself thinking how much more interesting it'd be if they was alive an' could find fault. Doin' for the dead gets kind of monotonous, I think.'
"'I don't,' says Timothy, decided. 'The minute you work for the living, you get all upset with being criticised. I s'pose the dead would find fault, if they could, over the way you cut the grass for 'em. But they can't an' so there's an end to it, an' we get along, peaceful. If they was living folks layin' there, you can bet they'd do some back talk.'